2007 September

A late report on Bandwidth 2007, “The “Music | Technology Conference” held in San Francisco August 17-18.

I moderated “The DRM Panel”, retitled from “Mano-A-Mano: The DRM Panel”, as it seemed the panelists would largely be in agreement. This was the case. None of the panelists were tied to a hard-core anti-DRM position or a die-hard DRM defense. Most were involved in businesses that serve as intermediaries between labels and online distribution.

There was broad agreement that in music, there has been a seismic shift away from DRM, for entirely pragmatic reasons — DRM is a pain for consumers, so has driven some to filesharing, concentration on protection has meant that the industry has not built services that use technology to provide value to consumers, leaving the likes of MySpace and Apple to slowly fill the gap.

One interesting observation was that the decline in CD sales is creating an opening for those in the industry who have been clamoring for a different approach for years. The alternative would be more circling the wagons with DRM, but that has already been tried.

There are many smart, progressive people in the music industry — we’veseenanumber of them experimenting with using CC licensing as part of their strategy — but it was cool to hear that they may be finally gaining the upper hand. There has of course been a ton of “Music 2.0″ innovation happening at the edges for years, but there’s no reason that shouldn’t kick into a higher gear with the involvement of and non-persecution by the majors.

We didn’t discuss this on the panel, but during the pre-panel preparation there seemed to be agreement that although DRM is on its way out for music, the movie industry would stick with DRM for a long time. My question, if there had been time, would have been “DRM didn’t work for the music industry, so why does the movie industry think its experience will be any different?” I’m still wondering about that.

CC Creative Director Eric Steuer was on a later panel called “Sue Me, Sue You, Sue Everybody!” in which there was a pretty strong consensus that suing fans is a pretty stupid strategy that also hasn’t worked out well for the industry. As previosuly mentioned, the really smart people are going beyond just not suing fans, but empowering fans with CC licenses.

However, as Bob Lefsetz points out, McCartney’s album looks like it’s a money loser for Starbucks — though McCartney likely made money from Starbucks who probably paid him a nice sum to put the album out on the new label. However, as Lefsetz points out, he could make a lot more in concert revenue much faster. Lefsetz goes on to point out what we’ve been pointing out for years: McCartney would have been better off giving away the music for free everywhere, and actually getting people to hear it. In fact, Lefsetz suggests that he might have put more effort into making better music if he knew that there was a much bigger likelihood that people would hear it and care about it. Where I disagree with Lefsetz is his belief that it makes sense to offer the music for free for now, while you still get a promotional bump just for announcing that you’ll be giving away music for free, that it won’t make sense in the future when lots of artists are doing it. Instead, it seems likely that more and more new models will arise, where the music acts as the promotion, and bands make their money elsewhere. The more popular and widespread the music is, the more opportunities there will be to make that money elsewhere. Once bands start seeing success using that model, more and more will pile on, and people will wonder why anyone pays just for the music if they’re not given anything else of value with it.

Behold is a phenomenal resource that “attempts to catalogue CC images with quality comparable to that of professional image archives such as Getty Images or Corbis, by using the social structure of Flickr and image content analysis”.

The ultimate aim of Behold is to offer graphic designers and artists access to high quality images that they can freely use, a goal that is accomplished through the use of CC licences. Very simply, users can define whether or not they want their results to be “free to use”, creating an array of new options that would not have been so conveniently realized prior.

Flickr’s rich repository of open content is not only inspiring in terms of the sheer amount of photos available, but even more so in terms for its ability to allow interesting and innovative resources, such as Behold, to be built. Even more promising is the wider trend to incorporate CC-licensing into new content directories as they are built, a movement that can only lead to even greater cultural amenities.

“Moderator William Uricchio sets the scene for panelists’ discussion of current copyright wars with a brief historical overview of copyright protection. In 1790, when news traveled by horse and carriage, copyright protection was good for 14 years. Today, when a digital, networked society enables instant transmission of data, protection lasts 70-plus years. Uricchio notes, “Bizarrely, the faster information circulates, the longer we’re extending copyright protection. It seems totally at odds with where our constitution framers and case law emerged from.” […]

Hal Abelson [Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, MIT School of Engineering] offers his sense of how copyright concerns constrict life at the academy. MIT, he says, has begun putting fences up around its own course materials, including the most basic and central of thinkers. For instance, it has limited online, published versions of Aristotle, Pascal and Fermat to students in a particular course, for a single semester. Huge expense goes into getting permissions from faculty, and university lawyers are so concerned about offending copyright holders that they bar reams of material from MIT’s OpenCourseWare site. Abelson believes these fences risk “destroying the university as an intellectual community,” and recommends using open content (granting Creative Commons licenses) as much as possible, as well as aggressively exercising fair use.”

Visit MIT World’s Web site to listen to this wonderful discussion, as well as to learn more about the forum’s participants.

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At this weekend’s Singularity Summit in San Francisco, “openness” of all sorts — open source, open access, open content, transparency — seems to be considered an uncontroversial and important part of making “AI and the future of humanity” a good one, for example:

If the singularity is in fact near, the fundamental tools of information, collaboration and access will be our best hope for making it happen in a way that spreads its benefits and minimizes its dangers — in short, making it happen in a way that lets us be good ancestors.

However, Creative Commons was mentioned in reference to a forty year old poem, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace by Richard Brautigan. Paul Saffo highlighted the poem as an example of a “positive, compelling vision that ordinary people could buy into.” But before showing the poem, Saffo highlighted the copyright notice as CC-like:

Here is an example of a 2005 blogging of the poem (go there to read it). The blogger specifically cites the permission, though whether a blog qualifies as any of the permitted mediums may be questionable. So yes, granting permission up front does help spread your work, even decades later, and yes, it is good to have lawyers involved in drafting the permission language. Forty years later, Creative Commons has both taken care of. :-)

Andres Guadamuz, co-director of the AHRC Research Centre for Studies in Intellectual Property and Technology Law at Edinburgh University (home of CC Scotland), will close the speaker part of the seminar with “Rights Management Information: Current Issues in the Legal Framework”.

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OwnTerms is an online repository for CC-licensed legal documents, allowing business startups easy and open access to various contracts without the cost of having a specific one tailored in their name. From OwnTerms:

OwnTerms is designed as a repository for “boilerplate” legal documents: those that every web site, startup, or entrepreneur needs but doesn’t want to draft in a lawyer for.

All the documents on OwnTerms are licensed under a Creative Commons license, enabling anyone to take them and edit them for their own use provided certain conditions are met.

Founded by Tom Scott, OwnTerms demonstrates not only the practicality of CC-licences on a broad level, but also the value and commitment of the CC-community as a whole. The idea for OwnTerms was born on the CC-Community list and was crafted with the community’s help, representing a neat circle in terms of problem solving and an ideal project example for those interested in CC-related endeavors.

Although Ownterms was launched just a little over two weeks agoit has begun to gain traction and as its community grows, so does the breadth of its resources. In taking this project from start to finish, Scott and the CC-community have helped craft yet another invaluable resource based around the concept and implementation of CC-licences.

James Boyle‘s latest column in The Financial Times – “The irony of a web without science” – examines how the lessons learned from the world wide web can and should be applied to the sciences. From research funding to commercial publishing, Boyle posits that the capabilities made available through the advent of the Web and its design are not adequately being applied to scientific research.

Boyle writes:

“The greatest irony, though, is this. The world wide web was designed in a scientific laboratory to facilitate access to scientific knowledge. In every other area of life – commerce, social networking, pornography – it has been a smashing success. But in the world of science itself? With the virtues of an open web all around us, we have proceeded to build an endless set of walled gardens, something that looks a lot like Compuserv or Minitel and very little like a world wide web for science.”

The article notes a key element of Science Commons philosophy – the almost-mythical “e-research” world, where collaboration is the norm and we design our systems for the network. […]

“By creating assets available exclusively online and licensing them under Creative Commons, we are encouraging increased interaction between Sony and our target audience,” says James Kennedy, General Manager for Communications Europe at Sony.

…

Leo Ryan, director at RMM explains the strategy behind the campaign, “Previous work with Sony BRAVIA proves that amazing digital content can provoke online buzz around a campaign on its own. However, we believe that it’s essential to use online PR and social media relations to amplify this buzz. We’re linking strong relationships with influential bloggers and social networks, with natural search optimisation campaigns to ignite debate, build buzz and drive visits to the website”.

It’s great to see that Sony and the marketing firms behind this campaign see that “viral” marketing needs to empower hosts for maximum impact.